If you're moving piles of personal papers and stacks of mail off the dining room table every night to clear the way for supper, it's probably time to carve out space for a home office. Here's how MomSpeaker/professional organizer Darla DeMorrow handled the DIY task in a particularly cluttered home of a family of six.
I’ll turn anything into a home office, because I don’t know anyone these days who doesn’t need one. And especially when mom has four kids and four businesses, mom needs a home office!
Does this look familiar? The dining table is command central, which makes family meals more difficult than they should be.
Luckily, she already has the space for a home office. This office armoire isn’t being used by anyone in the household, so we lay claim to it. I would have taken a picture of all the unused clutter inside, but we had to organize the entire room before we could even reach the cabinet.
In just a few hours, we have all the clutter sorted, moved out and grouped into projects. More importantly, we have all of mom’s businesses, books and a tickler file moved into her new home office. Existing files that were previously in a plastic bin are now in the file drawer on the lower right. The stack of papers that need to be sorted (not shown) is less than a foot tall.
All it took was an afternoon and permission for mom to create her own space. She’ll plan on working on her laptop from the sofa that’s next to this cabinet, or maybe she’ll still hang out at the kitchen table, but this is now mom central, and all of her business supplies and files can land here, instead of getting in the way of dinner.
Darla DeMorrow is a Wayne, PA mom, professional organizer and author. This post was adapted from her blog Heartwork Organizing. She also blogs at The Pregnant Entrepreneur and you can circle her on Google+.
